Almost three years after its first season, Wednesday season two was dropped, and it quickly became clear what that gap between episodes cost Netflix: a 59% drop in US viewership across its first 12 weeks, according to new data from analytics firm Luminate. It’s a pretty alarming figure, and one that gives clarity to what a lot of us have been feeling about Netflix’s recent stumbles.

Luminate’s lengthy report delves into TV and music release strategies and trends, and has come up with a disarmingly clear diagnosis for our present moment in entertainment. Any streaming hiatus that’s longer than 18 months, the report states, will likely shrink a show’s audience, and something like Severance (which actually grew despite behind-the-scenes troubles and a long wait) is the rare, expensive exception rather than the rule.

The 18-month cliff-edge

The damage gets worse with every long wait

Credit: Netflix

This arbitrary deadline for fresh content is dubbed simply a “long hiatus” in the report, meaning anything more than a year and a half between seasons. There’s evidence to back up the claims, too, with Wednesday’s aforementioned second season, which arrived 2.75 years after the first, losing 59% of its previous viewership.

The Night Agent’s second season, meanwhile, didn’t appear for 1.8 years and dropped by 47%. Even Stranger Things, a cultural juggernaut by anyone’s standards, didn’t prove as bulletproof as you may expect, and shed 23% of its US audience over the 3.5-year wait between its penultimate and final seasons.

That’s just Netflix, and over at Prime Video, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power saw a similarly bleak drop-off, with 57% of its audience exiting after a two-year gap between seasons.

Bridgerton makes things a little complicated, as according to the full breakdown of the report’s per-show figures, season three survived a two-year wait relatively unscathed (down by just 7%), while season four dropped by 20% after a shorter 1.75-year hiatus.

By Luminate’s own reasoning, that shouldn’t be the case, but the report goes on to hypothesize that this kind of damage to viewership numbers can compound and, once a show has lost its momentum, the next lengthy wait can cause even more harm. The Night Agent supports the same theory from the other direction. Netflix trimmed the gap before season three down to a single year, and the show still lost another 22% of its audience, a decline Luminate ties directly to the drop-off season two had already suffered.

Catch-up isn’t the magic bullet it used to be

That bump isn’t guaranteed anymore

Credit: Netflix

It’s not all doom and gloom, though, and many of the old tricks are still being deployed by studios and showrunners. Catch-up viewing, which used to mean renting a box set one disc at a time from your video store, moved to streaming in a big way, and is often credited with making shows like Breaking Bad the runaway success they became. Suddenly, shows that started small could find an audience during those periods spent off the air. The same thing, arguably, happened to Severance.

It’s the “out of sight, out of mind” vs. “absence makes the heart grow fonder” argument, but it’s not a trend that can be relied upon. For every Stranger Things (binged from the beginning by many fans ahead of its final season) and The Gentlemen (its first season shooting back into the Netflix global top 10), there’s Bridgerton, or any of the other shows mentioned above.

The timely shows are the ones still growing

But a yearly release schedule is harder than it sounds

Average viewership has collapsed in the age of ‘peak TV’, with more and more content vying for our attention every second of the day, so it would be reasonable to greet those long breaks as a well-earned breather we can use to catch up on something else. However, that doesn’t seem to be what the data shows.

Max’s The Pitt and Paramount’s Landman both returned almost exactly a year after their first seasons, and both grew by 132% and 52%, respectively. Meanwhile, shows that look like safe bets, like HBO’s Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon, have seemingly been dragged down as season gaps have stretched. But as shows have gotten more elaborate, more expensive, and harder to make – not to mention starring actors who have busy movie schedules to contend with – it’s now incredibly ambitious to churn out a season every 12 months, even if episode counts have gone down. Gone are the days of 22-episode seasons returning reliably to our screens every September.

That’s a problem every big streaming original is stuck with now: prestige, scale, and ambition on one side, and an audience with finite patience and attention spans on the other. Severance and The Pitt are proof in different contexts that it can still work, but it took a three-year wait, a cliffhanger ending, and a genuinely aggressive marketing push from Apple to pull off for the former, and Luminate is careful to note that combination isn’t something every show can replicate.

I’ve felt that fatigue myself, the kind that has people walking away from a subscription entirely rather than waiting out another three-year gap for a show they’ve half-forgotten. There’s just too much good TV for that.